”Products: Are We Getting the Right Ones?” by someone you might know (or might not)

Hi Everybody,

Tomorrow’s presentation will be about product comparators and configurators. Although both aim to assist customers in choosing products that meet their expectations, they function quite differently. While comparators present similarities and differences, configurators assist in gradually customizing products. The two systems have pros and cons but they both share the same variability information.

The talk will present:
- What’s a Product Comparison Matrix
- Their advantages
- And 5 open research questions on improving PCMs using variability models.

And to answer the question of who will present. Well, it’s someone you might, or might not, know. Yes, this person is so discreet that if not for the paychecks sent to his bank account, few would know of his existence. He’s so quiet that when people leave his office, they lock the door with him still inside. Mr. Incognito he has been called by the few who have actually seen him. He has somewhat of a mysterious and ghostly feel to him, so quiet it’s almost as if he lives between this dimension and the next. This person’s name is Guillaume Becan, one of our brightest and newest Ph.D students.

FYI, Guillaume will be presenting this work at VaMoS (http://vamos2014.unice.fr/), so this will be his warm-up presentation.

Let’s wish him the best,
Walter Rudametkin

A few words from our Leader & Presentation by Mohamed

Hi everyone,

We will be having our first DIVERSE-Coffee of all time today. Hooray!

The agenda is:
- Initial speech by our glorious founder and leader, Benoit Baudry, who will encourage us to fight the hordes of “ignorants” by enlightening them with our research.
- Mohamed, one of our first year Ph.D students, will be presenting his master’s degree work; valuable work that lead him into our graces and the future salvation given through the Doctorate degree.

Remember, coffees are Thursdays at 1pm, almost always in the Minquiers room.

Happy new year!

Walter Rudametkin

Model Transformations with Thomas Degueule

Hi Everybody,

I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the American holiday of Thanks Giving [1] than to have a Coffee. We were worried we wouldn’t find a turkey for our Coffee, but luckily enough, we found the next best thing to a loud, abnoxious animal that runs around and nobody really understands… Thomas!

Thomas is an extremely chatty yet deeply sensitive young man with strong convictions that has but recently begun his studies towards the holy grail of education, his PhD. Thomas will be presenting his master’s degree project and will talk about mutation analyses of model transformations.

Let’s give Thomas a nice gobble [2] and welcome him to the team.

Walter Rudametkin

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qafbJkacX8E

GIT by Erwan Daubert

Hi Everybody,

Today’s coffee is going to be about Git.

The Urban Dictionary defines Git as “A completely ignorant, childish person with no manners” [1], so it is no wonder that our dear Erwan is such an expert

Wait a second, I think Erwan is referring to Git [2], the decentralized version control system. All the better we have this talk since Git is a powerful and majestic tool that deserves to be used in only the most respectful manner. Just for the anecdote, after a fallout with a tool provider, Git was developed by Linus Torvalds et al. to be used for developing the most awesome operating system in the known universe, Linux! Git is now quite a success and is leading the way towards social coding with sites like Github and Bitbucket building collaborative environments around it.

I don’t want to spoil anything else, so let’s give Erwan a big hand.

Best regards,
Walter Rudametkin

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=git
[2] http://git-scm.com/

MSPL bad examples with Bosco Ferreira

Hi everybody,

Triskell coffee’s are full of fun times and wonderful moments, and the next coffee is no exception. Our beloved Bosco will honor us by presenting his work on Model-based Software Product Lines [1] that earned him the best paper award at SPLC this summer [2]. His work focuses on generating MSPLs that create invalid product models despite a valid configuration in the variability model. The idea is that bad examples can serve as a guide when customizing derivation engines, when implementing checking rules that prevent early incorrect CVL models, or simply when specifying an MSPL..

So, who says bad things can’t lead to anything good?

I would like to remind everybody that the coffee will be held in the *Aurigny* room and not our regular room.

Até a próxima,
Walter Rudametkin

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2491639
[2] https://www.inria.fr/centre/rennes/actualites/best-paper-award-pour-joao-bosco-ferreira-filho-doctorant-au-sein-de-l-equipe-triskell

A development framework for trust-aware self-adaptive systems

This Thursday prepare to dance flamenco, eat tapas and drink some wonderful sangria with Francisco Moyano.

Francisco Moyano is a Ph.D student at the University of Malaga, Spain and is doing a short internship, for the second time, in the Triskell team. His research  interests include trust management and security engineering.

Francisco’s presentation will focus on his Ph.D work around Trust and Reputation.

Trust is continuously increasing in relevance, and is part of the field of Computer Security. There is no standard definition for trust, but it is often agreed that trust can leverage decision-making processes under risk and uncertainty. Reputation is a concept tighly coupled to trust and which has often been used in web applications to empower users with better decision criteria. Yet trust and reputation have not been tackled seriously from a software engineering perspective. In this talk, we will see a trust framework built on top of the Kevoree component model that yields a breeding ground for building better reconfiguration decisions in self-adaptive systems.

Olé Francisco, we trust you to give a good talk… braaavo !!!

Walter Rudametkin